He was worth €10m at 33. Now Philip Marley is being chased by a pack led by IBRC. But the defiant capitalist says he doesn’t fear bankruptcy and plans his own reality show, Rich And Ditched

If you ever wanted to know what happened to the Celtic Tiger cubs, have a chat with Philip Marley, who made his fortune at the age of just 33 when he floated his student accommodation company on the London Stock Exchange.

The short answer is that they still have their claws. Marley, now 41, is a bruiser, a battler. His philosophy is simple: capitalism is the only system that works and entrepreneurs should be feted, not thwarted – and he will fight anyone to ensure that happens.

He has never been bankrupted but has no fear of it, seeing it as a badge of honour, not shame. And he is sailing close to the wind. Last week, Maven Capital Partners, with whom he ran Space Student, the accommodation business in Britain, sued him for £800,000 over what they say is the ‘useless’ Costa Rican bond he used for the investment instead of the promised cash.

Separately, he is in dispute with the IBRC, formerly Anglo Irish Bank, over a €12m loan used to buy rental property in Britain.

Good life: Philip Marley and his new girlfriend Dana Wilkey on a Folrida beach, will star in their own TV reality show about rich expats

He is also involved in what seems a rather unlikely project for a businessman. Earlier this year, he met Dana Wilkey, one of the stars of US reality TV show Real Housewives Of Beverly Hills and they officially started dating on the Fourth of July. Together, they are planning a new show called Rich And Ditched, about expats living in London and, especially, their love lives. He and Wilkey will star.

That’s the unsurprising part because Marley, it seems clear, likes attention. Rich people, he offers without being asked, tend to have egos – and, at the height of his wealth, his ego was a €10m one. It allowed him to indulge his passions, which include fashion, travel and cars. He had a Jaguar XK and still owns a classic Aston Martin Lagonda.

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Of course, ego can be the enemy of self-awareness. Marley is very focused, articulate and self-assured but he has a tendency to speak in the sort of clichés you read in self-help books. ‘When the going gets tough, the tough get going,’ he tells me at one point. Later, he adds that he likes to work hard and play hard.

But for all his outward assurance, he still seems apprehensive about how he is perceived. At first, he wants to supply the photographs to accompany this interview, studio shots he’s happy with. We always take our own pictures but when the photographer arrives, Marley is anxious about how they will look and starts to choreograph them. ‘Edgy’ is the tone he settles upon, the image he wishes to convey.

Drive: Dana Wilkey obtained top honours in UCLA

He has arrived late after the Heathrow Express broke down and he missed his original flight from London. He had wanted to wear a suit but instead is dressed casually in blacks and greys. His three-quarter-length coat is well tailored and I suspect it cost a lot of money.

There is a sense that control is important to him, validated later when he says he never gets involved in deals now unless he does them himself – and, obviously, if he is the producer of a reality TV show, he will have ultimate control over how he is edited. That may not be a good thing because there are times when one suspects he doesn’t realise how much of a throwback he sounds, to the days of expansion and excess. As Ireland debates the relationship between economy and society, there is no doubt which side Marley would take.

But then that’s the way of the self-made man, the one who never took a handout and who clawed his way to the top.

Born in Terenure to a Northern Irish Catholic father and a Jewish mother (‘I come from 6,000 years of persecution,’ he laughs, but it sounds like another ‘tell’, as they say in detective novels), he moved to Glasnevin when he was a child; his accent also seems to be stuck half way between the south and north sides of the city. His parents each had four children when they met and they went on to have another five together.

Marley was educated at St Vincent’s in Glasnevin, ‘a tough school’, where his classmates included soccer star Kenny Cunningham. His mixed religious background presented challenges. ‘I got blamed for killing Jesus a few times, even though I had an alibi,’ he laughs. ‘My mother, Jacqueline, was open about being Jewish and proud of it. Only in later life was I able to take pride in that part of my heritage.’

The insults taught him a lesson it’s clear he has never forgotten. ‘There were two ways to survive – you either kept your head down or your head up,’ he says.

He studied accounting at the College of Commerce in Rathmines but hated it. Instead, he rented an office across the street and, at 18, set up an advertising agency that employed 15 people. Then, for two years, he managed the Celtic Knights, a male stripper troupe billed as the Irish Chippendales. It was a wild time. ‘You see behaviour you would not believe from three generations of women,’ he laughs.

But the really serious money came with Ely Property Group, once the biggest provider of student accommodation in the country. After two years, he sold it to an English company, Newcourt, for £22m. They over-borrowed and hit a rough patch in 2008, and Marley bought Ely back for £1, with all its debts. ‘Then I went to war with the banks,’ he says. ‘I knew there was value in there but it was value I wanted to extrapolate for my own benefit, as a capitalist.

‘I’m a huge believer in a scrap and I believe that in a recession, the rulebook goes out the window.’ He doesn’t have much time for banks. ‘I believe the banks have pulled off the biggest heist in history,’ Marley says. ‘People blame the likes of Seán Quinn for the fact that they have to pay more tax but they never would have had to if the banks had taken the hit. It never would have been passed on to the normal people.

‘The riots in Dublin on the night of the Budget are only the beginning of civil unrest and we’re going to reach a tipping point. Unless Michael Noonan is prepared to fight the ECB tooth and nail, at whatever cost to himself and his government, he should go.

‘After the election last year, we had a golden opportunity to stiff the bondholders first, like the Icelanders did, and we f****d that opportunity. Now we’re in debt to the ECB, which is a much more difficult animal to crack. If we do not go to war with the ECB, the people of Ireland will suffer for decades.’

He also has genuinely credible suggestions for recovery. ‘Because there’s no new housing supply, the rental market is good,’ he points out. ‘Low rent is better than no rent. I also think there are ways to repurpose a lot of these office buildings.

‘The British have introduced £9,000 tuition fees so if I go to college in London, I’ll pay that and £275 a week in rent. Here, I can study for free and it will cost me €80 a week to live in similar accommodation. Dublin is a natural international campus because we speak English. We need to turn this city into a learning hub. It’s low-hanging fruit but our visa regulations are wrong for many students and we need to change those. We need to fast-track foreign students in here and we need to turn Dublin into an academic capital of the world, which is the quickest route to foreign direct investment.’

Official enthusiasm has been sluggish. ‘We pitched this a long time ago to Dublin City Council. There have been forums but, in typical Irish style, forums go nowhere so entrepreneurs need to take control of this situation.

‘In Ireland, we seem to want to destroy entrepreneurs by bankrupting them, people who have taken the greatest personal risk that they can take. We want to send them into the abyss in a way that no other country would.

‘If we don’t have wealthy people who can create wealth, we won’t survive. Would the Irish people be happier if the whole nation was impoverished? The last thing we need is begrudgery. It will be the final nail in our coffin. We really need to learn to support risk takers. If we lose the concept of risk, we lose the soul of a capitalist economy.’

Risk is everything, he says. ‘I’ve never been declared bankrupt but a couple of people tried over the past year. It’s something I’m absolutely unafraid of. I see it as a complete badge of honour.

‘You took the ultimate risk. You employed people, you took on a huge personal debt, you guaranteed debt and you’re the one going in front of the firing squad. That’s a sign of greatness.

‘Do it three times? No. Twice? Not really. But everyone should be allowed do it once. If you’re made bankrupt, you have to be truly brilliant to come back. Bankruptcy will always wash out the weak and bring back the best. If a footballer makes a bad foul, you ban him for six matches.You don’t cut off his f***ing legs.’

That’s a controversial view because bankruptcy is not without collateral damage. What about the little guys, the sub-contractors and suppliers, who can lose their livelihoods as a consequence? ‘I am a capitalist and I believe in capitalism’s fundamental rules,’ Marley retorts. ‘Know your client. If your client screws you and you didn’t see it coming, that’s bad management. Number two, know your market. If the market is shifting, the writing will always be on the wall. And, most importantly, don’t whinge about it afterwards because no one likes a cry-baby.’

He believes in effort and reward. ‘I fight like a lion to sustain my businesses and I have no fear of spending. I don’t give a damn what people think. I earned my rite of passage. I want to see Irish people in general spending. It’s the only way we can save this economy. We also need to find a way to be more collective in the way we fight back on issues like the property tax. It’s absolutely laughable. Who’s going to put a value on our homes? Will it be the same valuers who overflated the valuations in 2005 and 2006?

‘We had a property fetish that got us into a lot of bother. The last thing we need now is that property costing any more. In any case, it’s the banks that own the properties, not the people. People are just servicing debt. Let the banks pay the property tax.’

Marley’s obsession is Common Interest Communities, where people with shared beliefs or interests live together. He has a village for actors in Los Angeles. ‘We tell them where to go to get their headshots done, what auditions are on. There’s audition space, students are sharing information about castings. In Britain, we’re doing our first Arab-only community for Saudi students. It’s Sharia-law compliant, there’s a mosque on site, their traditions are fully respected and they feel more comfortable there.

‘I spent a million on software and another half-million on interfacing with social media. I now can look at a building in any major urban centre and tell you exactly who should live there. The connected generation will choose to live together. We’re making Facebook a physical reality.’

Isn’t there a danger, though, that such developments will become latter-day ghettoes?

‘When I started student accommodation, people said I would make ghettoes but the most beautiful towns in the world are student towns – Oxford, Cambridge, Galway,’ he says. ‘If you take a CIC for single mothers, can you imagine the benefit of having childcare on tap, career facilities, school? Ghettoes come when people aren’t nurtured, when they’re abandoned, so a CIC is a completely opposite concept to abandonment.’

In Ireland, he sees lots of opportunities: ‘We easily could house 1,000 Brazilians in one building. They would love to live together, to have their own TV channels. We also have interest here from Muslim groups, like medical students.

‘We would love to talk to NAMA to find buildings for these projects but getting an answer from NAMA is next to impossible. Bureaucracy has crippled them and most entrepreneurs have given up on them. It’s important that people know that. We have entrusted the biggest land portfolio in the world to a bunch of civil servants.’

Marley, who has three children under ten and is recently separated from his wife, is full of praise for Dana Wilkey.

‘She left home at 15, put herself through college and graduated with the highest honours from UCLA,’ he says. ‘She’s an incredibly diligent worker who set up an event management company in LA and planned events for the likes of Bruce Willis.’

They met in June at a party Marley organised and made the relationship official in July. ‘I had no idea she was on a reality TV show,’ he says. ‘I wasn’t a watcher of that kind of TV.

‘We immediately hit it off and decided very early that we would produce Rich And Ditched. It’s about rich people who are divorced or separated and find themselves living in London and starting their lives all over again. It’s a brilliant example of how young 40-year-olds are nowadays. There’s a whole scene out there.’

Marley and Wilkey may well be the highlight, though, assuming a network picks up the show. ‘We have a very high-octane relationship,’ he says. ‘We are very passionate and also can be very feisty. We’re no strangers to public displays of affection or of dispute.’

And there will, no doubt, be some conspicuous spending. Capitalism, after all, demands it. ‘I don’t like golf or anything that involves groups of men and no women,’ Marley explains. ‘I do like where possible to travel first class and I do enjoy hotels. I’m known for liking a good party. I made a decision when I lost money that as I made it back, I would treat myself to remind myself why I was working so hard.’

To that end, he has a New Year’s Eve party planned. ‘It will be on the roof of the Corinthia, a…’ – naturally – ‘five-star hotel in London right opposite the fireworks,’ he reveals with a smile.

What next year holds for him will be revealed in good time but one thing is for sure. There will be battles. There will be passion. And there will be not one scintilla of self-doubt. This is one tiger cub who believes he has earned his stripes.

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Philip Marley is being chased by a pack led by IBRC, but defiant capitalist says he doesn't fear bankruptcy